Generally, in large computer networks, such as those for business applications, several different and separate computer-based systems may be involved. These systems generally run computer programs that use data objects. Such computer programs may include systems or software that involve heavy data transmission within the computer networks, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. With computer networks, data replication may be used to reduce network traffic between systems and software, as not all data objects have to be transmitted for each operation. However, the more data is replicated within a network, the greater the chance that communicating systems or software will rely on inconsistent data or data will become corrupted. When this happens, important data may be lost.
In addition, within a distributed computer system, data objects used by several different systems may change over time without each system having knowledge of the changes made by the other systems. These changes may result in different object states. When, at a certain point in time, a system receives a message comprising a data object that is already stored within this system, problems occur when trying to merge these data objects. The problems and difficulties occurring during merging may be that the data objects look differently with respect to the last time the two systems exchanged data objects. In this case changes may be overwritten, or may lead to data inconsistencies. This leads to time-consuming staging processes, and can necessitate undesired user interaction.
To avoid these problems, some prior art systems lock data objects on a current system when replicated data objects are used within distributed systems. This locking ensures that the respective data objects may only be read and not changed on the current system. The lock on a data object may be resolved when the data object from the distributed system is received within the current system and the contents are merged. This merger usually results in overwriting the data object of the current system with data of the data object (of the distributed system) that has been changed. However, locking data objects results in loss of system performance.